Go-Getter

My lovely, dear Oona, whom I still refer to as Cornelius from time to time because I'm lame like that, turned sixteen yesterday (Wednesday--I should clarify, since blogger will probably add a few hours onto this and tip the scale). My thrift shop paperback (the unauthorized biography of Ewan McGregor) didn't quite match up to her tickets to London, but she grinned and bestowed a scrunch-nosed kiss on my acne-infested forehead anyway.

We spent a whole day walking in hundred-degree weather, watching French movies, scanning things onto iron-on paper for her new sweatshirt (okay, I had no real part in that) and generaly discussing life, celebrities and people we knew, particularly A. We saw The Island and both loved it, especially (okay, chiefly) because of Ewan, and put carnations in our hair (red for me, white and pink for her) and had exotic food and chocolate souffles at a restaurant with Harry and her parents and some friends of the family, and I slept over at her house and it was all very lovely and mellow.

I left a little after eleven the next morning, after a hearty round of Cocoa Puffs and some Dawson's Creek. I put the red carnation in a glass, hopped on the subway and showered and donned SoHo gear for my interview at the Used Book Cafe. I didn't finish all my community service last year and I don't especially feel like helping my abuela brainwash Mexican children with her religion just to get the service credit, especially since she doesn't think it's safe for me to cross the border and meet them now anyway. Anyway, the cafe was my alternative, and they accepted me with open arms. I even get free coffee/tea/beverages there and a significant discount now, since I'm a volunteer. I feel great about the whole business. The people there seem really cool, and they're all bookworms like me.

On the way home from the interview I bought a vintage Bob Marley t-shirt for my mom for $2 and a $5 sweater for myself by means of congratulation for getting out of the whole religious thing cleanly. And I realized that I'd successfully emptied a previously-full wallet in a week. I had another wallet at home with a bunch more in it--I'd only emptied my on-the-go wallet--but still. I've been living outside of my means, and it's got to stop. I have enough clothes. I have enough jewelry. I need to get rid of a bunch before I buy myself more stuff I don't need.

When I got home I dumped my bags on the sofa, carefully labelled all the unread books I'd bought myself at the cafe for $.50 a piece with white reinforcements, took off my boots and cleared up all the leftover papers from dad's cleaning spree.

My dad got all germophobic on us because his awesome hippy friends from New Mexico are coming to visit. Vooch (his real name is Jim, but we call him Vooch for reasons too strange to list here) works at Sandia Labs designing computer chip ceramics on an atomic level. I once questioned him (okay, my dad questioned him) about what exactly he did there, and he said "I try to make it fluffier." His girlfriend teaches dance of all types. She's danced on St. Mark's Place and all over the country and she goes to all sorts of Native American things that they won't let any other white people go to. She's beatiful. She's got this crazy dog named Pippi and we're not sure what breed he is because nobody's ever seen a dog like that before. He doesn't shed.

Anyway my dad started hyperventilating about how messy our apartment was because he saw a mouse in the kitchen and told Rosa to make us clean everything up. I didn't clean of my own free will, though. I'm more fiesty than that. Rosa at least knows me, though, and she knew I wouldn't do it without a greater incentive than the one he gave. After much deliberation she decided that the best way to get me to pick up would be to block the door to my closet while I was at Oona's and thus force me to clean everything up before going to bed.

It worked. I'd organized everything within an hour of coming home and I happily donned my boots again, took two of Renata's fresh sugar cookies for the road, and set out to fix my camera.

Long story short, I ended up buying a new lens because fixing the old one (regular mount) to the body I have (bayonet mount) would cost even more than the lens they had on sale. And it's a beautiful lens. I never thought I'd own a camera or a lens that nice. I never thought I'd find one I liked more than my parents' old black Nikon F-2, but that's life, right? I got lucky somehow and I now own my own lovely camera. I made my mom go over its subtleties with me for about two hours after dinner (which consisted of baguette, cucumbers and mozarella) and she keeps ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the camera. I'm dying to learn how to develop my own film. Ideally I'd like to learn to print, too, but there's not enough space in my house to set up a real darkroom, and I'm not exactly rolling in cash to pay for all the equipment with, either.

I justified the purchase, of course, by telling myself that from now on I'll be shopping a lot less. I won't have the time. I'll be too busy taking pictures.

I got irritated when my mom turned down the Bob Marley shirt ("V, I don't really like rap...") and when she moved my hot pink milk crates into the toy closed that I was planning to turn into a makeshift darkroom this weekend and accidentally turned one of my ring-holder hands upside down and got my to-upload cd pile mixed with the ones I'd already finished uploading in an effort to make my room "more presentable." "Your room looks like CBGB's," my dad complained when he got home. "Thanks," I said proudly. He frowned when he noticed that I'd put a poster of his high school rock band, Kermis, next to my favorite Monet paintings (ripped out of a two-year-old calendar).

It's not like I haven't been thinking about how my room looks. I just have very different taste than them. And he's wearing a plaid shirt just like mine in his band poster.

My mom's new obsession is 24, even though it makes her nervous and after she watches it she always starts warning me about strangers and men.

In writing things down today for the first time all week I realized that I'm simply overrun by ideas. With absolutely no obligations I manage to write Stonehenge-sized to-do lists, booklists, dream lists, story- and poem-lists, concert-lists... my brain never rests, even when I give in to silliness or romance or food. I'm so alive and interested in everything, and I just never stop!




P.S.- the humpty dumpty shirt mentioned in the last post turns out to have been designed by Grace Slick. Awesome, huh?